Security News
A former Canadian government employee this week agreed to plead guilty in the U.S. to charges related to his involvement with the NetWalker ransomware syndicate. The 34-year-old IT consultant from Gatineau, Quebec, was initially apprehended in January 2021 following a coordinated law enforcement operation to dismantle the dark web infrastructure used by the NetWalker ransomware cybercrime group to publish data siphoned from its victims.
US prosecutors on Thursday said they have extradited a Canadian man to America to face charges that he conspired to distribute ransomware.The Justice Department identifies Vachon-Desjardins as "a former Canadian government employee" without specifying which government agency.
A Canadian who used the Netwalker ransomware to attack 17 organisations and had C$30m in cash and Bitcoin when police raided his house has been jailed for more than six years. Sebastien Vachons-Desjardins of Gatineau, Ottawa, was sentenced to six years and eight months in prison earlier this month after pleading guilty to five criminal charges in Ontario's Court of Justice.
Investigations that ran in parallel over nearly two years by Canadian and U.S. law enforcement have led to this week's arrest of an Ottawa man, who is alleged to have an extensive track record of ransomware attacks on companies, governments and individuals. The highly-publicized arrest is a message to North American ransomware operators - law enforcement is on the case.
A Canadian man is accused of masterminding ransomware attacks that caused "Damage" to systems belonging to the US state of Alaska. A federal indictment against Matthew Philbert, 31, of Ottawa, was unsealed yesterday, and he was also concurrently charged by the Canadian authorities with a number of other criminal offences at the same time.
A Canadian teenager has been arrested for allegedly stealing $37 million worth of cryptocurrency via a SIM swap scam, making it the largest virtual cash heist affecting a single person yet, according to police. "The joint investigation revealed that some of the stolen cryptocurrency was used to purchase an online username that was considered to be rare in the gaming community," according to a statement from Hamilton Police.
The attack took place on October 30th, causing regional health systems to shut down their networks and cancel thousands of medical appointments. This outage affected health systems in Central Health, Eastern Health, Western Health, and the Labrador-Grenfell Regional Health authorities.
An "Insidious" new SMS smishing malware has been found targeting Android mobile users in the U.S. and Canada as part of a new campaign that uses SMS text message lures related to COVID-19 regulations and vaccine information in an attempt to steal personal and financial data. Proofpoint's messaging security subsidiary Cloudmark coined the emerging malware "TangleBot."
Rogers is currently affected by a nationwide outage in Canada that prevents customers from accessing wireless voice and data services. The outage started at approximately 1 AM, with users taking to social media to voice their frustration that they can't access voice or data.